Myth of the clean Wehrmacht
The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is the negationist notion that the regular German armed forces were not involved in the Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The myth, heavily promoted by West German authors and military personnel after World War II, completely denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and perpetration of war crimes. Even where war crimes and the waging of an extermination campaign, particularly in the Soviet Unionthe populace of which was viewed by the Nazis as "sub-humans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspiratorshave been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers corps", the Schutzstaffel, but not the regular German military.
The myth began during the war, being promoted in the Wehrmacht official propaganda and by soldiers of all ranks seeking to portray their institution in the best possible light; as prospects for victory faded, these soldiers began to portray themselves as victims. After Germany's defeat, the verdict of the International Military Tribunal was misrepresented as exonerating the Wehrmacht. Franz Halder and other Wehrmacht leaders signed the Generals' memorandum entitled "The German Army from 1920 to 1945", which laid out the key elements of the myth, attempting to exculpate the Wehrmacht from war crimes.
The victorious Western Allies were becoming increasingly concerned with the growing Cold War against their former ally, the Soviet Union, and wanted West Germany to begin rearming to counter the perceived Soviet threat. In 1950, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and former officers met secretly at Himmerod Abbey to discuss West Germany's rearmament and agreed upon the Himmerod memorandum. This memorandum laid out the conditions under which West Germany would rearm: their war criminals must be released, the "defamation" of the German soldier must cease and foreign public opinion of the Wehrmacht must be raised. The Supreme Commander of NATO, U.S. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, having previously stated his belief that the "Wehrmacht and the "Hitler gang" were all the same", reversed this position and began to facilitate German rearmament in light of his deep concern over Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe. The British became reluctant to pursue further trials and released already-convicted criminals early.
As Adenauer courted the votes of veterans and enacted amnesty laws, Halder began working for the U.S. Army Historical Division. His role was to assemble and supervise former Wehrmacht officers to create a multi-volume operational account of the Eastern Front. He oversaw the writings of 700 former German officers and disseminated the myth through this network. Wehrmacht officers and generals produced exculpatory memoirs distorting the historical record. These writings proved enormously popular, especially the memoirs of Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein, and further disseminated the myth among a German public eager to cast off the shame of Nazism.
The year 1995 proved to be a turning point in German public consciousness. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research's Wehrmacht exhibition, which showed 1,380 graphic pictures of "ordinary" Wehrmacht troops complicit in war crimes, sparked a long-running public debate and reappraisal of the myth. Hannes Heer wrote that the war crimes had been covered up by scholars and former soldiers. German historian Wolfram Wette called the clean Wehrmacht thesis a "collective perjury". The wartime generation maintained the myth with vigour and determination. They suppressed information and manipulated government policy. After their passing, there was insufficient motive to maintain the deceit in which the Wehrmacht denied having been a full partner in the Nazis' industrialised genocide.
Outline
The Wehrmacht was the combined armed forces of Nazi Germany. Together, the army, navy and air force contained about 18 million men. The Wehrmacht was created on 16 March 1935 with the introduction of conscription. Approximately half of all German male citizens served in the Wehrmacht, either as conscripts or volunteers.The term "clean Wehrmacht" means German soldiers, sailors and airmen had "clean hands"; in other words, it claims they did not have blood on their hands from murdered prisoners of war, Jews, or civilians. The myth asserts that Hitler and the Nazi Party alone designed the war of annihilation and that war crimes were only committed by the SS, the Nazi Party's special armed force.
In reality, the general officers of the Wehrmacht, and many lower ranks down to common soldiers, were willing participants in Hitler's war of annihilation against perceived enemies of Germany. Wehrmacht troops were complicit in or perpetrated numerous war crimes, routinely assisting SS units with tacit approval from officers. In the aftermath of the war, the West German government deliberately sought to suppress information of such crimes to absolve former war criminals and allow their reintegration into German society.
Background
War of extermination
During World War II the government of Nazi Germany, the Armed Forces High Command and the Army High Command jointly laid the foundations for genocide in the Soviet Union. From the outset, the war against the Soviet Union was designed as a war of annihilation. The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as populated by non-Aryan "sub-humans", ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators. It was stated Nazi policy to murder, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations according to the Master Plan for the East.Before and during Operation Barbarossa, the German offensive into the Soviet Union, German troops were repeatedly subjected to anti-Bolshevik, antisemitic, and anti-Slavic indoctrination. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers described the Soviets to their soldiers as "Jewish Bolshevik sub-humans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "Red beast", and many German troops accepted this racialist ideology. In a speech to the 4th Panzer Group, General Erich Hoepner echoed the Nazi racial plans by claiming the war against the Soviet Union was "an essential part of the German people's struggle for existence", and that "the struggle must aim at the annihilation of today's Russia and must therefore be waged with unparalleled harshness".
During the retreat from the Soviet Union, German officers destroyed incriminating documents. Wehrmacht soldiers worked with the Schutzstaffel paramilitary death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and participated in mass killings such as at Babi Yar. Wehrmacht officers considered the relationship with the Einsatzgruppen to be very close.
Crimes in Greece, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia
The Wehrmacht carried out war crimes across the continent including in Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. The first significant combat for the Wehrmacht was the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. In April 1939 Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, had already arranged co-operation between the intelligence sections of the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen. The Wehrmacht participation in the large-scale killings of civilians and partisans in Poland was a prelude to the war of annihilation in Russia. On the first day of the invasion, Polish prisoners of war were murdered by the Wehrmacht at Pilchowice, Czuchów, Gierałtowice, Bojków, Lubliniec, Kochcice, Zawiść, Ornontowice, and Wyry. During the invasion, the Wehrmacht is estimated to have executed between 16,000 and 27,000 Poles, including at least 3,000 Polish POWs.Soviet Belarus has been described as "the deadliest place on earth between 1941 and 1944". One in three Belarusians died during the war. Most Soviet Jews lived in an area of Western Russia previously known as the Pale of Settlement. In this area, the Holocaust was carried out near populous towns rather than in extermination centres like Auschwitz. The Wehrmacht was initially tasked with assisting the Einsatzgruppen in their task of complete extermination of the Jewish population. In the town of Krupki, the army marched the Jewish population of approximately 1,000 a mile out of the town to meet their SS executioners. The frail and sick were conveyed by truck, and those who strayed were shot and killed immediately. German troops guarded the site, and alongside the SS, shot the Jews at the edge of a pit. Krupki was typical: the Wehrmacht was a full partner in systematic mass murder.
German military brothels were set up throughout much of occupied Europe. In many cases in Eastern Europe, women and teenage girls were kidnapped from the streets during German military and police round-ups to be used as sex slaves. Yugoslavian women were reportedly placed into brothels, and a 1941 document from the Osijek archives discussing plans for multiple brothels in Osijek, as well as the required sanitation procedures, has also been found. The women were raped by up to 32 men per day at a nominal cost of three Reichsmarks. A Swiss Red Cross mission driver Franz Mawick wrote about what he saw in 1942:
Uniformed Germans... gaze fixedly at women and girls between the ages of 15 and 35. One of the soldiers pulls out a pocket flashlight and shines it on one of the women, straight into her eyes. The two women turn their pale faces to us, expressing weariness and resignation. The first one is about 40 years old. 'What is this old whore looking for around here?' – one of the three soldiers laughs. 'Bread, sir' – asks the woman... 'A kick in the ass you get, not bread' – answers the soldier. The owner of the flashlight directs the light again on the faces and bodies of girls... The youngest is maybe 13 years old... They open her coat and start groping her. 'This one is ideal for bed' – he says.
According to a study by Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, the majority of Wehrmacht soldiers deployed to the Soviet Union participated in war crimes, including massacres, rape, and looting.
Wehrmacht soldiers committed widespread rapes against Soviet women on the Eastern Front. In some occupied localities, nearly all women were raped by German soldiers, and in several instances, entire military units participated in extreme acts of sexual violence. In early August 1941, the command of the German Ninth Army reported a significant increase in incidents of plundering and rape, even within the combat zone.
Yugoslavia and Greece were jointly occupied by the Italians and Germans. The Germans began persecuting the Jews immediately, but the Italians refused to co-operate. Wehrmacht officers tried to pressure their Italian counterparts to stop the exodus of Jews from German-occupied areas; however, the Italians refused. General Alexander Löhr reacted with disgust, describing the Italians as weak. He wrote an angry communique to Hitler saying the "implementation of the Croatian government's laws concerning Jews is being so undermined by Italian officials that in the coastal zoneparticularly in Mostar, Dubrovnik, and Crikvenikanumerous Jews are protected by the Italian military, and other Jews have been escorted across the border to Italian Dalmatia and Italy itself".
In Serbia, the Wehrmacht began the murder of the Jews from mid-1941, independently of the SS. In April 1941 in the early days of the occupation, Chief of Military Administration Harald Turner decreed the registration of Jews, including forced labor and curfews. This culminated in the Geiselmordpolitik, the reprisal killings by the Wehrmacht for insurgency and sabotage. In September 1942, the Wehrmacht was also involved in a massacre of civilians in Samarica, where they reportedly killed 480 "enemy combatants" with a loss of one German soldier. At the same time the Wehrmacht condemned similar actions taken by the fascist Ustasa party of the Independent State of Croatia.